The Sheets
by RamblerGaelige
Summary: A sordid tale of jealousy, despair, death, and consumption, not in the Moulin Rouge universe. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1

"I'm cryin' for you, Barry, every night I'm crying for you."

Nervous in the doorway, hands hidden like moles in black jacket. "'Tisn't natural, Julie darlin', to be cryin' like that, every night for hours. Sleep, machushla, don't be worrying over me. I've always come."

Silent in the bed, starched sheets and thermometre in permanganate in the window. Doubting, feeling her bones break through the skin. She's turning into a bone herself, knows it; she's never seen Barry so unsettled.

"Baby, I know what you're thinking, and I'm thinking it myself. You're looking at me for me to say I'm going with her, and you know that's just not true now, Julie darling." There's too much sunlight in the room, reflecting off every surface, white and white and ice and light down to the livery lino under the bed. It's a hole and he's falling through it, too much on his shoulders to keep floating, wants to fall but can't fall. Everything he loves and hates and would kill and die for is holding him up, steel needles out of that sharp white face.

Julie pulls her knees up, prays they were Barry. He's too distant, not close, not doting on her. She can't go to him, can't walk anymore without the shivers and the cough. "I think you'll be going to see her the instant you walk out of here, Barry Casserly, so you may as well leave now." Too bitter, too short. She can't hide her jealousy under a skin that can't hide her veins. The sunlight is overpowering, shines nearly through her.

Uncomfortable in the doorway. He can't come any farther. There is no balance here, and it's overwhelming. She's been stripped raw, pared of superfluities and comfort and restraint. "I gotta go, Julie, I gotta go." He is Satan, Heathcliff, kicking conscience and care into one coffin. His heart could be their pounding against the padlocked lid.

She is reaching up, shivering, feet like dead fish hitting the harshly waxed lino. "Don't go, Barry, don't go... I need, I.. need a glass of water, please, love, go to the nurses and get me a glass of water." Swaying, cheating physics and physicians. Barry between her and and the cheese-box-hatted nurses with their armour-plate aprons. Patient out of bed, out of options. She'll put her arms around him, love him, die trying.

The room's too cool now, sun behind clouds, and he's a fool with a dying woman clinging on, clinging, dragging him down through that big blessed hole. Her chin is sharp, digging in his chest, shivering with holding her insubstantial weight. "I gotta go, got things to do, Julie. Tell you what, John's coming around later with a bottle of lemonade for you, remember baby? But I gotta go..." A fool now, in this cool room. She's caught him out with that acerbic insight peculiar to the dying. He can't love this thing, this dying thing, can't stand to watch her disintegrating.

She's crying now, into his jacket, crying and coughing when she can't pull any air. "Open the window before you do. Open the window, darling, and let me breathe." It's impossible now, with the shaking in her bones and the dampness in the room. "I need a glass, need a glass of water, please stay just a moment..." She's killed him, suspected him to death. Magnified, he is cotton: porous, regular, simplistic. He can't hide his revulsion under a skin thinned by mental exhaustion. He has to go, go, into the air, out of the noxious and nauseous and horrible air.

Forces himself to hold Julie, lead her back to that gaol-barred iron bed. She's hardly there, no weight at all; pure wretched emotion and melting lumps of uneasy disease, poisonous with the need to be comforted, cossetted, appeased. She's dragging him down through the floor that is a hole, a portal to the worms and the earth and the dank dull smells of churches. Whispering now, demanding something; her expired voice is unnaturally forceful, harsh, an inaudible klaxon. "Would you, could you turn on the radio? It's so lonesome here, nothing to hear but yourself breathing."

She holds herself up by the headboard, half turned away from him, watching the street: three young mothers with black perambulators, respectable and firm and every one the same, living and breathing and walking alike. She is the centre of a nimbus, indistinguishable from the toxic rays of a sun Roentgen might have envied. "I watched for you in the street, Barry, watched all the afternoon. I thought you wouldn't come, wouldn't ever come with me so wasted up. You'd go to her, to her, she's alive and I'm stuck here with this damned - nothing."

Barry watches that narrow chest, her fish's chest, inflate; she will curse him, call down death and sorrow upon his uncomplicated workman's head. Curse her first; she will die anyway, and so much the better; twists his fingers together to stop his wicked urges to shake the spun-glass witch. "So what if I do go with her, eh? So what if I can't bloody stand to watch you die, die, and die hating me? You're over with, you're through; I'm alive and going to be alive when you and your bones and your hateful little mind are dust! Maybe I won't come tomorrow, did'ya think about that? You cried about it, cried to pass the time, that's what; really cry now because I'm gone, Julie. God help me, woman, I loved you, but I can't stand to see you die."

No answer from the window, only cold and clammy silence from the emaciated snow statue watching the windowpanes with exacting equanimity, circumspect and mathematical and wrenchingly false.

Pantomime rhonchi, aptheoses of ausculations, slide through the doorway's safe haven. "Visiting hours are nearly done, Mr Casserly. I think it's best that you leave and allow Miss McCarthy to get some rest." A nurse, young, ruddy in the cheeks and stoically solid of body behind her hard-starch apron. Her eyes accusing and direct beneath that white student's cap are judge, jury, and executioner, convicting him of murder. She carries, like an especially apt and perverse proverb, a glass of water. Julie's eyes, invisibly fixed on the mothers with perambulators, pull the lever, drop the trapdoor, and snap his neck. I'm a fool, a murdering fool, in this sick room, this cool room. The unencumbered sun will be cheerful, painfully and insanely cheerful.

Outside, he can smell the sickness on his skin.


	2. Chapter 2

"And how's your auntie now, Barry?"

She handles infernal teakettles as she handles potatoes: gracefully, naturally, and all too frequently. There's work in her hands; years and years of brooms and lye and washrags.

He's weary, unclean; still nauseous with incomplete revenge. "She's poorly." Question, not fact. Not certain of the veracity of the observed condition. His head falls, hand falls, stubs a Woodbine into the poxy tabletop. "Rather poorly."

Brigid is easy in her movements, comfortable in body and house and society. Not brilliant, mouth softening from the Spanish arch typical of Galway. Unusual summer light has freckled the tensile forearms, arms with muscles of hemp and fingers not far removed from a farmer's. "And sure, that's a shame for you, darling, with your Julie only gone a year. The consumption, was it?" Placid eyes, misty, quiet, unassuming; ordinary blue, common rain or bitter sun. She seems to see through nobody; takes them at face value, at their foundations.

"It was that, the TB, and so it is with my auntie." He can't look at the common woman opposite, common as linen and bed-pillows and tobacco. His hands are shaking, shivering, still sick-smelling with Julie in the cold convent bed. Brigid is a peerless foil to the child, cracked, haggard, consumptive.

Barry clenches his fingers against the shaking, against Brigid finding out his lie. 384 days. He lies twice for each, 668 lies, the one to Julie and the one to Brigid, every day of his damp and dolourous life.

"It's a curse on this land, with the damp and the smoke. Twice this year I've had mould growing right on my overcoat, would'ya believe it? I do think it's perfectly sweet to visit your dear auntie every day. 'Tis powerful kind." She is assured of his motives then, complacent. Only the perfectly honest, he thinks, harbour no suspicions of their fellows.

Brigid swallows bitter tea ahead of speaking her mind. She is common, a charwoman, perceptive of those around her, the tweeds, nuns, barristers, schoolgirls. Euclid is far and away too intricate for her midwifely brain. Barry Casserly, it's hiding something you are, and let's have it out before it bursts in your belly like a rotten appendix. Her face is blank, complacent, waterproof, a shopworn and reliable mask.

Across the ashtray table, he is in other lands. Four feet is impassable miles between watchful, witchful woman and raw stunned boy. "And wouldn't your auntie be now in the same hospital where your Julie died, Barry?" She might be asking the price of onions. This onion is barbed, armed, gauged to deliver, and strikes home.

His hands shake as he lights another cigarette.


	3. Chapter 3

She isn't cognizant now, unobservant, introspective. Conscious of little besides the young mothers under this bewildering sun. She hates them now, their haw-cheeked ebullience, and their close antiseptic cousins, breast-plated nurses, those floods of strained efficiency.

Julie is in a new room now, an old room, paint chipping and moisture dripping, slipping, ever present on the walls. Their colour must be the identical febrile, madhouse green of her bile. Conjecture is unnecessary, superfluous, to know that she spits the same when she does not spit red. The knowledge is superfluous. Her flesh is superfluous.

Barry is _hers_ now, that other _her_ that is nothing to do with Julie, Julie's narrow realm of damp infectious sheets and basins and a faint decayed smell exuding, seeping, bleeding from her skin. Embalmed, entombed, but releasing the undertaker's beneficent preservative compounds. Rotten, dying, melting, expiring, My fluids are killing me, it's not the disease, my own wrong, gone, dead, infected, infested self is doing the damage.

Her faint decayed smell is a deranged smell; they have taken away the curtains, sick vomitus orange curtains, pale and brittle as she is pale and brittle. The curtains are dying too, the year is dying, the world is dying.

"Open your mouth, Miss McCarthy, aaaaaaaaaah now. There's a love." The nurses are legion, perennial and pervasive as geraniums. Any of fifty or five hundred could be persuaded her to hold narrowly sheathed poisons on her tongue, one millimetre from Miyamoto and deformity. Is it that her own perverted systems are not poisoning her fast enough?

They must want her to die; every plump smiling girl is an aider and abetter to that massive common countrified _her_. He wants to come to me, has to come: he loves me. Not her, never her.

Arrange lips, tongue, teeth around lethal stick. Nurse is ennervated, grotesque, criminal. "Under your tongue, love, that's the way." Mild eyes are lies, masks, cold metal bits shrouding benevolently a demonic brain-case. Julie scowls, contorts, grimaces at the white stiff cap, the topgallant apron. Perhaps he never came for her, came only for this heiferish, sanitary piece of furniture, reeking of good health and permanganate. "Give him back, you fat absurd sheep."

No change in expression; accustomed to insults from fractious patients, poor sick sad babies! Dutiful, compassionate; play the Angel of Mercy. Above all, be kind, competent, refreshing block of stability. "Shall I open your window, Miss McCarthy? No? No matter then, but let's have back the thermometre, if you please." Easy, always easy; a calm nurse means a calm patient.

Evil now approaching, twelve o'clock level. I will not go along with this thievery: privacy, health, possessions, Barry. Rebel, you daftie. You're not dead yet, not entirely powerless. She has seconds, threads, to locate some weapon, some miniscule missile in symbolic resistance - she grinds her teeth fretfully, and has the solution. The nurse cried out, dodges quicksilver furious projectile. Time to impact three, two, one -

Julie giggles quietly, tacictly; she is vindicated in the fountain of glass and mercury.


	4. Chapter 4

Brigid walks, as she walks twice each day, every save Sunday, past St Rita's Hospital. The place is seventy-six, twice her age precisely, and roughly three times that of Barry Casserly. Children in the lane are convinced that the ruddy dry-skinned bricks literally ate Julie McCarthy, and Mona Casserly, Blake Casserly too, and Fitzsimmons Riley, and every other who grew thin and spat blood and was silently, shamefully spirited away in the night. The same children avoid Barry, him with two parents, an aunt, and a sweetheart lost or nearly so to the consumption, more than anybody else except old doddering Mrs Keogh who lost husband, parents, and all but one child in the killing winter of 1884.

Moony Barry Casserly, she had heard him called; moony and dreamy and infatuated with poor dead Julie McCarthy since he was knee-high to nothing. Pity about the whole business, but she hadn't known the girl past sight, even living in the same lane and with a common water spigot. Infatuated with her ghost now, and seeing Julie in Brigid's place above in the bed of a clandestinely taken night.

Steadfast brick, in the corner of her straight-focused eyes, from King Street to Waterford Lane, built by and of the steel-boned labourers like Barry (poor child! she crosses herself) in 1858 when Victoria was the Queen. Victoria's portrait, unwilling, grim, moralising, embitters the packets of biscuits Brigid feeds to Barry Casserly of an evening. Peculiar, not shiftless, sad life he had, two parents buried in the clay, dead of the damp and immured within it. His only relative an aunt, he said, now ill, expiring, dissolving in the rain and fog and circumstances of her social class.

She yawns, coughs, pulls her heavy moldy woollen coat close against the damp. An hour yet till she must be at her work, the dusty repetitious drudgery of sweeping, emptying, wiping, tidying. Brigid is a charwoman, a housekeeper, and has a charwoman's mind. Her thoughts are as neatly stacked and briskly dusted as the sheafs of paper she arranges on the barristers' desks.

There is a niggling, a wiggling, in one corner of her tidy mind. Julie McCarthy has been away a year, but has she been dead? There are too many loose ends, too many flaps of paper fluttering in the damp air. The whole packet could come suddenly and violently unwrapped, exposing a nasty clandestine fact. Brigid is not a physicist, unused to abstract thinking, but large shards of some shattered completed event clear suddenly before her.

"Mother o' God." She rolls the words around her tongue, enjoys the taste, and repeats it, drawing a few stares from passerby who are unaccustomed to sturdy middle-aged women blocking a sidewalk for sudden revelations. Julie McCarthy had grown thin, and spat blood, and been silently, shamefully spirited away, but Mrs McCarthy had made no mention of the girl's death. There had been no funeral, and for a pious fool like Teresa McCarthy, her who had aimed for the convent, the lack of a sacramental finish was beyond the beyonds. _It's hiding something you are, Barry Casserly. _"And I know exactly what."

Brigid arrests herself abruptly before the door of St Rita's, mashing the coarse insubordinate hair more firmly into its pins, replacing the worn but respectable hat she has worn since Kitchener died in the Great War. She quits walking, ceases perambulation - then resumes, with a new briskness about her, straightaway through teh mouldy oak doors and Corinthian-pillared portico of St Rita's, the County Hospital for Consumptives.

Inside:

"Excuse me, Madam. I need to see a patient called Julie McCarthy, if you please."

"Just a moment..." Nurse swoops into cold metal cabinet, finds almost instantly the proper papers. The drawer is nearly barren, only a few dingy papers in a sea of black enamel. As the drawer snaps closed, Brigid can read the impersonal grim designation on the front: Grave Cases.

She sucks in a startled breath. The bright eyes of the white-capped, white-aproned, white-cuffed girl in a sea of white, white, white, question. "Are you a relative of Miss McCarthy? I'm afraid only relatives are allowed to that ward."

"Relative?" Brigid, slightly floored, gapes as a fish would in the moments after it is caught. "A relative... yes," she nods firmly. "Her aunt."

_Still to be continued. _


	5. Chapter 5

A bleak fog of searing sunlight and disinfectant throttles Brigid, strikes her straight to the throat, the chest, weakening her knees. The fog is clammy, dismal; the spoiled-meat stink of sickness catches somewhere about her uvula.

"It's just along this way, madam; I'm so sorry but we can't allow too long a visit. Your niece - I'm so sorry, madam - she's very, very ill. Would you be amenable to having the chaplain in this evening? She hasn't much longer."

Brigid nods automatically, bewildered as endless windowed doors pass, blurred, unreal, allowing glimpses only of beds, walls, basins, and the cold impersonal whiteness of the sheets, sheets, sheets...

She takes a longer look through one door and sees a body she's certain is dead. The liver - coloured linoleum is suddenly interesting, something worth viewing. She studies her cracked leather shoes, suddenly ashamed, a schoolgirl. Black and black and _clack _and _clack_, endless and continuous as the lives of those behind the windowed doors are not and never will be. Mesmerised, inculcated, Brigid is lost in the fascinating current of her shoes -

The nurse pauses before a door, white on white. She opens it carefully, reluctantly. Is it a holy relic or a diabolical monstrosity caged up in here? Brigid is afraid to ask.

"This -" she manages, dry-lipped, hesitant with deceit. "This is - Julie's - room, is it?" The door is white, the walls are white; she can just make out, in the intense glare of the uncovered windows, a white-sheeted bed. _I'm afraid of the white. Mother of God, I don't care if I never see this colour again in all my living days. _

Stepping gingerly, she enters; the floor could be glass, the thin skin of a thermometre, aching to give way and plunge her into the scalding sea of mercury. The nurse has left; Brigid is utterly alone in a cold, damp room with her thoughts and a girl she believed to be dead a year before.

Julie McCarthy has withered; Brigid, totally unaware of the finer points of human anatomy, is imbued with an awful knowledge of man's gross components. Every segment, every element and piece of Julie McCarthy's body is only too visible beneath an inadequate skin too fine and watery white to conceal any longer the horrid whispered secrets of mortality, secrets which are collected much too neatly in a basin full of blood and slime. She is too consumed by fever to be flushed; Julie McCarthy is a white corpse in a white bed, alive only in and of her rapid and crepitous breathing.

Consumption has constructed of a living girl a plaster saint, a marble martyr. The eyeless St Lucy is there, as is the wheel-broken St Catherine of Alexandria; the painfully young consumptive St Therese of Lisieux, who died spitting blood and calling on the Virgin Mary to end her pain, accosts Brigid through Julie McCarthy's covered eyes and public decay. "Mother of God," Brigid whimpers. A child, a naive and frightened child, she kneels by the bed of Julie McCarthy. _My bladder must be near my eye, oh God, and so help me, I don't know what to do. _Tentatively, hesitantly, she folds her hands, steeples them into a tiny church of flesh. _Mother of God, I don't know what to do. _

The bruised and transparent eyelids, fenced in by protruding bone and sunken flesh, open, barely. Half-moons of blue iris, blue as water, blue as, Brigid imagines, the fluid that must fill Julie's lungs, move hazily to watch her. Brigid gazes back, suddenly and terribly calm beyond any capacity for control she was ever aware of, thinking stupidly that she must be outside her own body, watching all this from a safe place against the cowardly phlegmatic green of the walls, not brought to earth on liver-coloured linoleum by a bed of unbearable white. Out of nowhere, it's difficult to breathe, exhausting to inflate her lungs against the damp chilly infectious air and the oppressive reek of disinfectant and rotten meat: the pervasive penetrative odour of sickness. It seems to Brigid's whirling mind that the walls are tumbling toward her, never breaking, squeezing and shrinking. She swallows a scream, and finds that her hands have gripped Julie McCarthy's so desperately tight that her knuckles are pale as the girl and the sheets, white on white on white.

"Brigid." From the doorway, a voice - male, young, and completely bewildered. Brigid turns, keeping her gaol-door grip on the white-hot hands, and sees Barry Casserly for the first time since she has come to know him. His customary black jacket is off; to Brigid's newly opened eyes, he is virtually naked. The loose-hanging grimy shirt and braces cannot hide the hard knotty truth of ribs covered by inadequate flesh; the bony underpinnings of his face reveal for all to see, as no x-ray could, the minute dank events turning the flesh that is Barry Casserly into a damp, infectious mass like the one in the bed.

Julie stares at Barry, unable to process any coherent thought or feeling save an overweening sorrow. She is too far gone with the consumption, the damp unholy infection, even to speak. He comes closer, halts, and closer still, and kneels beside Brigid.

"Julie, Julie darling.. " He cannot speak, cannot express what possesses him, what controls him at this late date. It must be his own wrong, gone, infested lungs, gone the same way as Julie's, taking flesh with them. He knows, looking at Julie, that he will die, and, looking at Brigid, that she knows as well. She yields a thin, birdlike, bony hand to him; Barry takes it up, sensing a mouldy drowning humour under the skin - under his own skin, as well as Julie's. Crushing the pale ineffectual remnant of a human to his chest, he weeps for them all, the whole sick, decayed, deranged, and dying world, and for Julie McCarthy.

Brigid retreats to the wall, the safe green cowardly wall, some manner of anchor in this room which reeks of dying and of futile lives, ending in a time and a place where the very air screams, with Brigid, of the obscenity of the events it must witness. She sinks to the linoleum, drops to her knees, bows under a force she would never willingly acknowledge.

In the blinding, shining, consecrating light of the uncovered windows, a dead girl reaches upward, gasping, drowning, spitting the last of her lifetime in bubbles of red onto the defeated dirty whiteness of the sheets. From where Brigid watches, it all seems to move so much more slowly than it should; Barry dives almost gracefully for Julie, consumes her in his overbold encircling arms, does what he will and must and should at drunken speeds. As all things must, the agony elapses, the thrashing passes, and a fogbound silence covers the room of the green walls, bright windows, and blood-filled basin.

It is finished.

Brigid rises after some minutes, fumbling under an anaesthetic awe. She speaks automatically, from rote; vox Dei, ex machina.

"Eternal rest grant unto her, Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her... " She cannot finish, and stumbles to the door, tripping over the livery tiles. The enormity of death is smothering in the room, embracing and adulterating the smell of disinfectant to a maddening degree.

Brigid collides briefly, once, as a stranger on the street, with Barry as she fights blindly out of the room, leaving him in bleak communion with the dead.

In the awful brevity of that association, she can smell the sickness rising from his skin.

_FIN_


End file.
